| [Preface] [Contents] [Glossary] [Footnotes] |
PREFACE
My heartfelt thanks are due to all those who, directly or indirectly, have helped in the preparation of this book of translations; among the former, to Professor Israel Abrahams, for invaluable help and advice at various junctures; and to Mr. B. B., for his detailed and scholarly explanations of difficult passages—explanations to which, fearing to overload a story-book with notes, I have done scant justice.
The sympathetic reader who wishes for information concerning the author of these tales will find it in Professor Wiener's "History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century," together with much that will help him to a better appreciation of their drift.
To fully understand any one of them, we should need to know intimately the life of the Russian Jews who figure in their pages, and to be familiar with the lore of the Talmud and the Kabbalah, which colors their talk as the superstitions of Slav or Celtic lands color the talk of their respective peasants.
A Yiddish writer once told me, he feared these tales would be too tief-jüdisch (intensely Jewish) for Gentile readers; and even in the case of the Jewish English-reading public, the "East (of Europe) is East, and West is West."
Perez, however, is a distinctly modern writer, and his views and sympathies are of the widest.
He was born in 1855, and these stories were all written, quite broadly speaking, between 1875 and 1900. They were all published in Russia, under the censorship—a fact to be borne in mind when reading such pages as "Travel-Pictures" (which, by the way, is not a story at all), "In the Post-Chaise," and others.
We may hope that conditions of life such as are depicted in "The Dead Town" will soon belong entirely to history. It is for those who have seen to tell us whether or not the picture is correct.